Understanding Caching and Recommended Best Practices!

This week is dedicated to Caching! The goal is to learn the following:

• What is caching
• How does caching work?
• Different types of caching 
• Recommendations for optimizing Caching for Hi performance results 

Caching is the retention of a recently used object in memory for the purpose of improving query response time for future requests. Caching enables users to retrieve results from in-memory stored files rather than executing queries against a database. Hence, caching is considered one of the best ways to improve MicroStrategy performance.

Following are the different types of caches in Microstrategy environment. Each is explained in detail in consecutive posts. Also, included are recommended techniques and tips to optimize the usage of each type of cache to improve overall performance.

• Report cache - Accelerates up to 10% of all queries including dashboard datasets by storing report results in-memory
• Document cache - Accelerates dashboard performance by storing the final formatted output in memory - Flash, HTML, PDF, Excel
• Element cache - Accelerates attribute element requests for prompting, 20-40% of all database queries are used to populate prompt element lists.
• Object cache - Accelerates metadata object requests for rapid assembly into queries for report

For Microstrategy administrators who would like to know ways to maintain caches for easy Microstrategy environment maintenance can also refer this post.